Foreign workers: one in four leave after one year

Almost half of Malta’s non-Maltese workforce has been on average employed for just 1 year, before upping sticks and leaving the island.

Data presented in the House of Representatives shows that over 48,000 foreign workers employed in Malta between 2013 and 2023 spent just 12 months in employment.

They represented 25% of the total workforce of 190,000 of foreign workers over the same decade, a sign that one in every four of these workers pass through Malta for non-permanent employment.

But the effects of such temporary employment will be felt by those who complain of infrastructural pressures from migrant labour, language barriers, and problems inside communities which lack cohesion.

The Jobsplus data was tabled in the House by the finance minister in a PQ filed by Nationalist MP Rebekah Borg.

On average, the foreign worker employed in Malta between 2013 and December 2022 spent just over 22 months in continuous employment.

Another 98,664 foreign workers remained active in the Maltese labour market.

Of the cohort of 91,000 workers no longer active, 48,000 spent not more than one year in employment (52%). Just over 1,300 workers spent the entire decade in employment before leaving (1.5%).

Foreign workers in 2013 totalled 13,500 and climbed to over 70,000 by the end of 2022. The greatest leap in foreign employment was in 2018 when workers increased by almost 40% from 29,000 to 40,000. The data is gleaned from the Labour Force Survey, which data does not always accurately include the total number of gainfully occupied workers.

The LFS, however, suggests the average salaries of this foreign workforce remain well below €20,000 in 2022: the mean salary for this large cohort, which includes both EU and non-EU nationals, was €17,000 in 2013, and grew to just over €19,900 in 2022, a 17% increase over 10 years. The figures exclude supplemental incomes from overtime, bonuses or allowances.

The same data also suggests that with a median national income of €16,500 for foreign workers in 2022, a very large segment of this foreign workforce is employed in Malta’s lowest-paying jobs.

Foreign working class

A decade of massive economic growth in Malta marked by the importation of labour from overseas, saw more foreign workers replace a declining share of Maltese workers in the lowest-paid salary bands.

Despite a growth in Maltese workers from 155,000 in 2012, to 174,000 in 2022, the actual number of ‘native’ workers paid less than €20,000 decreased by a sheer one-third – 29.1%.

In 2012 there were 108,000 Maltese nationals earning less than €20,000 a year; a decade later they fell to 77,000. In all other salary bands, there was an increase in the Maltese workforce.

The same data suggests that many of these jobs were directly filled by low-er-paid migrants from outside the Euro-pean Union, even if these numbered just 37,000 in 2022.

So-called third-country nationals totalled just 3,560 in 2012, growing exponentially since then. Yet the largest increases in TCNs were in those salary bands that fall below €20,000: from a mere 3,000 in 2012 (85% of the TCN workforce) to 29,000 (71% of TCN workforce).

The data clearly suggests the slow ‘decline’ in lower-paid working-class jobs for Maltese nationals, was eventually taken up by workers from outside the European Union.